In recent years crises and disasters (Eyjafjallajökull and Deepwater Horizon 2010, Fukushima Daiichi 2011) have made it obvious that a more resilient approach to preparing for and dealing with such events is needed. DARWIN will improve response to expected and unexpected crises affecting critical infrastructures and social structures. It addresses the management of both man-made events (e.g. cyber-attacks) and natural events (e.g. earthquakes). The main objective is the development of European resilience management guidelines. These will improve the ability of stakeholders to anticipate, monitor, respond, adapt, learn and evolve, to operate efficiently in the face of crises. Guidelines will be presented in formats for easy usage and maintenance to avoid them being dust-collectors on a shelf. To enable dynamic, user-friendly guidelines the project will adapt innovative tools (e.g. serious gaming, training packages), test and validate the guidelines, and establish knowledge about how organisations can implement guidelines to improve resilience. A multidisciplinary approach is applied, involving experts in the field of resilience, crisis and risk management, social media and service providers in the Air Traffic Management and health care domains. To ensure transnational, cross-sector applicability, long-term relevance and uptake of project results, a Community of Crisis and Resilience Practitioners (CoCRP) will be established, including stakeholders and end-users from other domains and critical infrastructures and resilience experts. The CoCRP will be involved in an iterative evaluation process to provide feedback on the guidelines. The target beneficiaries of DARWIN are crisis management actors and stakeholders responsible for public safety, such as critical infrastructures and service providers, which might be affected by a crisis, as well as the public and media. The project duration will be 36 months, requesting financing of €4.9M.

Whilst citizen participation in environmental policy making is still in its infancy, there are signs of a growing level of interest. The majority of citizens, though, both as individuals and as groups often feel disengaged from influencing environmental policies. They also remain unaware of publicly available information, such as the GEOSS or Copernicus initiatives. The SCENT project will alleviate this barrier. It will enable citizens to become the ‘eyes’ of the policy makers by monitoring land-cover/use changes in their everyday activities. This is done through a constellation of smart collaborative technologies delivered by the SCENT toolbox in TRLs 6-8: i) low-cost and portable data collection tools, ii) an innovative crowd-sourcing platform, iii) serious gaming applications for a large-scale image collection and semantic annotation, iv) a powerful machine-learning based intelligence engine for image and text classification, v) an authoring tool for an easy customization by policy makers, vi) numerical models for mapping land-cover changes to quantifiable impact on flood risks and vii) a harmonization platform, consolidating data and adding it to GEOSS and national repositories as OGC-based observations. SCENT will be evaluated in two large scale demonstrations in Kifisos Attica and Danube Delta. Our consortium covers the complete stakeholder chain: industries in machine learning (IBM), SMEs in crowd-sourcing (U-Hopper), gaming (Xteam) and awareness raising (Carr), leading research institutes with expertise in hydrodynamic modelling (UNESCO-IHE), data harmonization and authoring tools (ICCS) and environmental monitoring (DDNI), NGOs at the pilot sites (HRTA, SOR) and policy makers/public bodies (Region of Attica). The SCENT initiative will go beyond the current project and form a European-wide citizen movement, created and fostered by the SCENT stakeholders, that will ensure its sustainability and its complementarity with existing citizen partnerships.

Ovarian cancer (OC) is the most lethal of female cancers, often termed a “silent killer”. DISARM’s overall approach to tackle the significant gaps in hereditary OC management lies in tackling both key elements of risk assessment and early detection. The project will investigate multifactorial risk assessment versus standard practices in 4 EU Member States (MS) (Lithuania, Portugal, Czech Republic, and Greece), and will upscale and validate a set of easy-to-use, highly accurate and affordable technologies in five countries (UK, Lithuania, Portugal, Czech Republic, and Greece). Several intelligent digital assets will optimally support and enhance our clinical studies, while a range of multifaceted activities will ensure the future uptake and adoption of DISARM solutions. The project aligns with the Innovation Action character of this topic by focusing on both mature technologies that can be upscaled in routine healthcare and on emerging technologies that have already shown a potential to justify larger scale validation activities. Our ultimate ambition is to holistically investigate the preconditions and set the stage for rolling out proven solutions in routine OC risk assessment, and in parallel to create further evidence for the introduction of novel promising elements in early detection programmes. DISARM gathers 26 partners from 12 countries (10 EU MS, the UK and Canada), thereby exhibiting a significant geographic coverage, strengthening European and international collaboration and ensuring widespread diffusion of the project results. This action is part of the Cancer Mission cluster of projects on ‘Prevention and Early Detection (early detection heritable cancers)